What the Enlightenment was to the Industrial Economy, Pragmatism was to the Information Economy.
Pragmatism – dismissed by Europeans as a curiously American invention – has come to guide how our experts and leaders think about everything even though we don’t much talk about it. To be dismissed in the modern world, tell someone you’re an idealist. To be respected, tell them you’re pragmatic.
One of Molière’s characters was surprised and delighted to learn that he had been speaking prose all his life without knowing it. We’re like that with pragmatism. Most of us have learned to think like this without even being aware that we are thinking like this.
The first published mention of pragmatism was in 1898. Arguing, as I do, that the 20th century was shaped by the rise of the knowledge worker, this timing is fortuitous. The 20th century was a century in which thousands of new jobs and areas of studies emerged. This sort of rise in specialization isn’t the product of people looking for universal truths; it is the product of people looking to solve specific problems.
Pragmatists didn't see ideas as some abstract truth out "there" to discover but instead as tools no different than a fork or knife. Ideas either enabled us to create the world we wanted or did not. William James wrote about the cash value of an idea: did it pay you to have this idea? And of course, for the knowledge worker who began a career with a university education, this was a very relevant question: what did it pay to be able to solve problems in this particular domain?
Enlightenment philosophers like an Isaac Newton were looking for universal truths. The apple falling from the tree as Newton pondered gravity was the aha moment in which he realized that gravity was universal - something that applied to the apple falling from a tree, the moon orbiting earth, or earth orbiting the sun.
Pragmatists had smaller goals. They were less interested in whether an idea was universal than whether it was effective here and now. Will this line of code stop the program from crashing? Will this change to the wing design stop this plane from crashing? This sort of problem-solving and design did, indeed, rely on some general principles but the value of the knowledge worker lay less in her ability to spout these universal truths than to solve this specific problem.
Universities were greatly shaped by pragmatist’s focus on the particular. The 20th century did not just see the rise of the knowledge worker – a person who worked with their knowledge, translating it into cash value as William James had suggested – but of university as prelude to careers. Out of pragmatism’s focus on specifics came a proliferation of new majors and careers. It was not enough to be an engineer. One had to choose whether to major in civil, electrical, mechanical, computer, chemical, industrial, or circuit engineering. None of these specialists were trying to discover the universal truths that a Newton sought; they were focused on solving a particular set of problems, translating their work into the cash value of the market place. For the knowledge worker, ideas were not abstractions; they were a source of income. The knowledge worker is very pragmatic about his knowledge.
The pragmatists were operating in a post-Darwinian world. For the pragmatist, we have minds because they help us to adapt to our environment. Our minds don’t simply mirror our world but help us to generate hypotheticals that let us adapt ourselves or our reality so as to live better.
It may seem innocuous enough for pragmatists to each focus on their own set of problems and possibilities. No pragmatists stood up to challenge the church or British Empire the way that the Enlightenment philosophers who led revolutions had a century or two earlier. But as it turns out, continuously creating new products and solutions is incredibly disruptive. If revolution overturns reality, evolution creates a new reality. The latter may work more slowly but it might actually change us just as much, if not more.
The Enlightenment philosophers who created democracy and capitalism in the US around 1800 gave us a new world. So did the pragmatist philosophers who created public education and the information economy around 1900. That one simply came with less fanfare and violence.
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The brilliant Louis Menand discusses his books The Metaphysical Club here. It is his book which properly introduced me to pragmatism. He does not make the tie between pragmatism and the information economy but he's incredibly insightful and, of course, the pragmatists like William James, Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey are fascinating characters.
The brilliant Louis Menand discusses his books The Metaphysical Club here. It is his book which properly introduced me to pragmatism. He does not make the tie between pragmatism and the information economy but he's incredibly insightful and, of course, the pragmatists like William James, Charles Peirce, Oliver Wendell Holmes and John Dewey are fascinating characters.
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